TSA Agent Not Sure DC Driver’s License Counts as Valid ID

Every year around Christmastime, some cousins,
friends, and I partake in a bar crawl around our hometown. The
first year, this included the local strip club (located behind the
town’s public library, because we’re classy like that). But when we
tried to return the following year, the elderly barmaid/bouncer
refused to let me in. Everyone else she would allow, but she was
certain it was illegal for Ohio drinking establishments to accept a
Washington, D.C., driver’s license as valid identification. And
though we tried to reason with her—I had just come from
the bar across the street, which seemed to find my ID perfectly
acceptable—this lady was nothing doing. 

I bring this up because one might assume an official agent of
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be smarter
than your average 70-year-old barkeep at an Ohio strip club. But
then one would assume wrong. In what is surely my favorite tale of
TSA incompetence in recent memory, a TSA agent at the Phoenix
airport
didn’t think that D.C. drivers’ licenses counted as valid ID,
owing to the fact that D.C. isn’t a real state.

According to the Washington Post, D.C. resident Ashley
Brandt was attempting to fly home last week when she ran into a
little glitch going through security. After taking a look at her
D.C. license, a TSA agent told her, “I don’t know if we can accept
these.” Did Brandt perhaps have real identification, like a U.S.
passport, with her?

“She didn’t seem to know that it was basically the same as a
state ID,” Brandt
told the Post. “The whole thing was kind of ridiculous
and strange. Apparently in Arizona, they’re not sure we’re all
right.”

The befuddled agent called out to a manager, who assured her
that, yes, the TSA does accept D.C. licenses as identification. Now
if only someone could convince that bartender for me … 

(H/T
Boing Boing)